Bringing in your photos

Add from Camera Roll

Open the Gallery, tap the ≡ menu at the top right, then Add Photos, then Add from Camera Roll. Livo asks for permission to your Photos the first time, then brings in every photo and video, newest first, including photos that live only in iCloud. A big library takes a while; you can keep using Livo, and the progress shows under the Gallery header. Show me the menu.

If you allowed Livo only some of your photos, it works with those and says so. Before it starts, Livo checks your free space (“Importing about 140 items needs about 2.3 GB”): it warns if the import would leave under 2 GB, and will not start below 1 GB. If space runs out part way, the import pauses and keeps everything it has brought in; start another import to carry on.

What Livo keeps

For every photo: its date, place, size and a small copy (800 × 800) that Livo uses when Photos is slow, when a photo is only in iCloud, or when it is gone from this phone. Your photos themselves stay in your Camera Roll. Deleting a photo in Livo never deletes it in Photos.

The badge on the ≡ menu

The ≡ menu carries a small red number when there is something new to bring in: photos added to your Camera Roll since the last import. A photo Livo itself put in your Camera Roll (a photo from a capsule you received, say) is not counted as new.

Other ways photos arrive

A Time Capsule or a gift someone sent you puts its photos in your Camera Roll and in Livo in one step; see Sending to someone. With Curator, photos can also come from OneDrive and from printed photos you scan with the camera. Open Scan Prints to scan a printed photo, open OneDrive Accounts to connect OneDrive and choose folders to add, or open Where My Photos Are to see where each photo is kept. A friend’s Family Share arrives through Receive from Family.

Cleaning up

At the end of every import Livo looks for the same photo brought in twice and keeps one record of it, with everything you had written on either copy. Two records are treated as the same photo only when the whole files match. Your photos are not touched; only Livo’s own duplicate record goes. The message says “Livo also cleaned up its library” when that happened.